Immigrants and other minorities are underrepresented in politics in most Western democracies. We argue that strategically acting party gatekeepers who update their nomination strategies based on voter behavior contribute to this representation gap. Drawing on unique panel data from Swiss local elections, we find that candidates with a ‘foreign-sounding’ name systematically receive not only fewer […]
 
In the context of increased global mobility, it is fundamental to understand migrants’ needs and how governments can ensure equal health opportunities for both regular and irregular migrants simply by applying low-cost primary health care measures. To identify health issues in which to intervene, this study analysed the impact of a mother’s lack of legal […]
 
This interdisciplinary special issue brings mobility scholars and migration scholars together to examine how places and mobilities are entangled. It asks whether using place as an entry point for studying human movements can reveal new insights into our understanding and conceptualisation of mobility. In this introduction we demonstrate, based on the contributions gathered in this […]
 
Research on neo-nomadism has focused mainly on privileged forms of lifestyle migration, portraying these practices as individual choices but paying little attention to their embeddedness in constraining socioeconomic structures. Yet, neo-nomadic practices are increasingly involving lower- to middle-class people. They may experience a sense of freedom and subjective upward social mobility; however, their lives are […]
 
BackgroundSwitzerland is characterised by significant flows of migrants from different countries of origin and with different levels of education. More than half of recent migrants have reported experiencing prejudice or discriminatory practices in the last 24 months.MethodsBased on a 2018 survey of 7,740 adult migrants (aged 24-64) who arrived in Switzerland in 2006 or later, […]
 
Intense pressure for international solutions and weak support for multilateral cooperation have led the EU to increasingly rely on its strongest foreign policy tool in the pursuit of migration policy goals: preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Starting from the fragmentary architecture of the migration regime complex we examine how the relevant content of the EU PTAs […]
 
States struggle to establish multilateral cooperation on migration – yet they include more and more migration provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This article sheds light on this phenomenon by introducing the Migration Provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements (MITA) dataset. Covering 797 agreements signed between 1960 and 2020, this dataset offers a fine-grained coding of […]
 
La décision de se naturaliser dépend non seulement du profil et de la trajectoire migratoire des personnes susceptibles d’acquérir une nouvelle nationalité, mais aussi des caractéristiques des pays d’accueil et d’origine. Peu d’attention est toutefois portée aux changements survenant dans le pays d’origine. Cet article s’intéresse à trois évènements ayant pu affecter la naturalisation des […]
 
The paper examines the patterns of economic integration of refugees in Switzerland, a country with a long tradition of hosting refugees, a top-receiving host in Europe, and a prominent example of a multicultural society. It relies on a unique longitudinal dataset consisting of administrative records and social security data for the universe of refugees in […]
 
The study of international migration and responses to it has experienced rapid growth in the last three decades: an institutionalisation of migration studies. This paper identifies and specifies infrastructural and semantic elements of institutionalisation by establishing a global Directory of Migration Research Institutions identifying 282 institutes focused on migration research that were operative between 1945 […]
 
Family migration has gained prominence as one of the main reasons for international mobility in both Switzerland and the rest of western European countries. However, research aimed at evaluating the economic performance of reunited families has been constrained by the unavailability of individual income and/or household composition data. The joint use of population registers and […]
 
Are politicians more responsive to foreign citizens if they have the right to vote? To examine this question, we exploit regional variation in voting rights for foreign citizens in Switzerland. Our original audit experiments find no evidence that local politicians are more responsive to foreign citizens depending on whether foreign citizens have the right to […]
 
Transnational ageing processes are usually studied by focusing on the various cross-border practices and mobilities of different categories of ageing migrants. This paper introduces a retirement mobilities approach as an analytical framework that draws on both transnational studies and the new mobilities paradigm to widen the theoretical and empirical debates. It argues that both migrant […]
 
Dans cet article, j’examine les corrélations entre crise économique, changements de pratiques d’éloignement des étrangers et création de catégories d’indésirables. Pour ce faire, je me penche sur les expériences individuelles des étrangers polonais pour voir comment le rapatriement des étrangers est devenu un moyen d’éloigner les étrangers pour des raisons politiques, alors qu’il était destiné […]
 
In public health crisis governance, effective communication has been shown to move people from awareness to compliance. This article examines the effectiveness of the communication strategy developed by stakeholders in the European multi-level governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. An original dataset of over 40,000 tweets from 65 actors in Switzerland, France, the UK, the EU […]
 
This paper examines the causal effect of the possibility to vote on foreigners’ propensity to naturalise – a key indicator of successful integration. Based on Swedish administrative data and an institutional setting producing a quasi-random assignment of the eligibility to vote, we find that the overall effect depends on the composition of the migrant population. […]
 
We develop a minority influence approach to multilevel intergroup research and examine whether country-level minority norms shape majority members’ perceptions of discrimination. Defining minority norms via actual minority discrimination and political participation, we hypothesized that in national contexts with greater minority experiences of discrimination and greater minority political participation, majority perceptions of discrimination should be […]
 
Research on the interplay between inclusive norms and intergroup contact on improving intergroup orientations has yielded conflicting results, suggesting either that an experience of personal contact is necessary to have a positive effect of inclusive norms or that such personal experience is not always necessary. To clarify this issue, across four studies (N = 835), […]
 
Qualitative research has been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the possibilities that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Zoom offer to qualitative scholars. Based on the experience of using such technologies to collect qualitative data for our PhD studies, we present how we dealt with the challenges of […]
 
 
 
 
The study of transnationalism raises important questions about the effects of political rights that international migrants enjoy in different places. We contribute to this debate asking the following question: Do international migrants who retain voting rights in the place of origin have a greater propensity to vote in the local elections of the country of […]
 
Persistent hiring discrimination as demonstrated by correspondence experiments incites immigrant job candidates and their descendants to modify their résumé to hide their immigrant status, that is, résumé whitening. To date, we have little to no empirical evidence on how common this is in practice. We test the extent of résumé whitening with a representative survey […]
 
Literature posits that mainstream right-wing parties have adopted restrictive positions on immigrants’ entitlements to social rights to avoid losing votes to populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs). Although studies recognize that this co-option is only partial, we know little about the remaining differences between PRRPs’ and mainstream right-wing parties’ welfare chauvinism strategies. This article fills this […]
 
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study how humans allocate scarce resources in times of hardship. We study public preferences regarding who should get access to government aid for the self-employed, a bed in the intensive care unit, and permission to cross the border using original conjoint survey experiments administered to an incentivised […]
 
Compared to their male counterparts, refugee women exhibit low employment rates in many countries. Discrimination by recruiters could possibly explain this phenomenon, but thus far, there is little direct evidence on this. This study addresses this gap. We develop a set of hypotheses about the effects of gender and family status on refugees? labor market […]
 
This contribution investigates public attitudes toward providing financial help to the self-employed, a less well-researched area in the otherwise vibrant literature on welfare state attitudes. We analyse to what extent the self-employed themselves soften their general anti-statist stance in times of need, and how the public thinks about supporting those who usually tend to oppose […]
 
The rise of digital platforms has in recent years redefined contemporary capitalism—provoking discussions on whether platformization should be understood as bringing an altogether new form of capitalism, or as merely a continuation and intensification of existing neoliberal trends. This paper draws on regulation theory to examine social regulation in digital capitalism, arguing for understanding digital […]
 
This article explores the interplay between digital work and mobility through a look at the career trajectories, remote work practices and im/mobilities of professionals in the information technology (IT) sector. We draw upon a qualitative study conducted with IT professionals who work remotely for Swiss or Swiss-based international companies. IT professionals have been pioneers in […]